Ulysses Love Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph), except for the "Circe" episode, which is (Chapter.Line) and the "Penelope" episode, which is (Chapter.Page). We used the Vintage International edition published in 1990.

Quote #4

Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M.B. loves a fair genteman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alive, the elephant. Old Mr. Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs. Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves her Majesty the Queen. Mrs. Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. (12.430)

Here, some voice or another (either the narrator or the author or something in between – it gets complicated in Ulysses) makes fun of Bloom's preaching love by imitating childish love talk and sentimentality. What ideas of love are we taught as children? What truth is there in it? How can we (or the characters in the book) talk about love without falling into sentimentality?

Quote #5

She had loved him better than he knew. Light-hearted deceiver and fickle like all his sex he would never understand what he had meant to her and for an instant there was in the blue eyes a quick stinging of tears. (13.66)

Gerty is thinks longingly of Reggie Wylie, except that her voice is a parody of the sentimental style of young girls novels. Is it fair for the narrator to parody Gerty's inner voice? Is it misogynistic? What do infatuated young girls know about love, if anything? What's the difference between infatuation and love?

Quote #6

"Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle." (15.402)

These are Bloom's dejected words in Bella Cohen's brothel, as Zoe flirts with him and kids him for being so glum. Why might this seem particularly true for Bloom today? Do you think that Bloom believes this simplistic definition of love? How does this comment fit in with Bloom's other thoughts about love in the novel?